Twenty years after Tiananmen: Silence on the square

Sunday, 14 June 2009 10:15
The Economist

Outside the Communist Party, memories of the 1989 massacre get hazy

AMONG journalists at a Chinese newspaper, there has been some surprising talk of publishing a story to mark the 20th anniversary on June 3rd and 4th of the massacre of hundreds of Beijing citizens by Chinese soldiers. One journalist even told his colleagues he would be ready to go to jail for doing so. But such bravado, especially if it proves more than rhetoric, is likely to be rare. For many in China the nationwide pro-democracy protests of 1989 and their bloody end have become a muddled and half-forgotten tale.

The hope before the storm: remembering the spring of 1989

Twenty years on, the memory of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square has not faded, but the events in the weeks that led up to it have been largely forgotten

It is 20 years since Ding Zilin stood by her gate and waited for her son.

“What came were students with tattered clothes and disheveled hair, shouting ‘they are killing people, they are shooting at people,’” she said.

“The more we watched, the more terrified and desperate we felt ... At about five in the morning we saw a car with a flat wooden board on it and a child’s body on the board. When I saw the body of that child I felt my son’s fate was the same and he would not come back again,” she said.

When We Talk About Tiananmen

Sunday, 14 June 2009 09:43
Melinda Liu

Twenty years later, China is still trying to move on. But nothing can happen until an honest retelling of what happened on June 4 takes place.

Here we are, talking once again about what it was like to hear the zinging of bullets, the screaming of the wounded, the blaring of garbled Orwellian propaganda from public loudspeakers in and around Tiananmen Square. It's been 20 years now. Even as I recount the horrifying anecdotes I feel like a vampire, feeding off the blood that soaked the flagstones of that blighted place.

Guarding History

Sunday, 14 June 2009 09:35
Anka Lee

The five flagpoles that stand in front of the Star Ferry terminal at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula in Hong Kong have long been a popular meeting place. It was at this familiar spot 20 years ago that democracy advocates sold commemorative items to raise money for the victims of the June 4 crackdown at Beijing's Tiananmen Square. I bought one: a four-inch plastic replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue that had been erected at the square. For a 9-year-old trying to make sense of the world, that keepsake was a concrete link to the revolutionary scenes spanning the globe during that eventful year.

228 Tâi-uân-sîn

We're 228 Followers

@-Bian Casters

Show your support and write a letter to former President Chen Shui-bian.

Newsflash

Crowds of angry Han Chinese protesters took to the streets of the city of Urumqi yesterday to demand better security, less than two months after deadly unrest rocked the capital of mainly Muslim Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

Police ordered residents to stay indoors and stationed officers throughout the city, in a forceful response aimed at staving off a second wave of bloodshed following that in July, when nearly 200 people were killed.